Computer networks are becoming increasingly complex and difficult to manage. This is driven in part by the ever-increasing variety of network devices, computers, and software being combined together to integrate large enterprise-based intranets with the Internet. Network management tools have been produced to monitor these complex combinations of hardware and software and help troubleshoot network failures when they occurred.
Traditional network management tools use a protocol called simple network management protocol (SNMP) to monitor network devices such as routers, switches, hubs, remote access devices, or even computers in a network. The protocol used to interface with SNMP includes rudimentary commands to operate on data such as to “get” a variable, “set” a variable, or “test” a variable.
Having just a few simple commands make it difficult to perform network management tasks. Specifically, it can be difficult using these basic commands to develop sophisticated network management applications to monitor and troubleshoot a network. Each task may need to be customized to the parameters and capabilities of each network device. Further, a network management task sending combinations of these commands to one or more network devices connected to the network may wait a significant period of time for all the necessary results to be returned. Network delays can be caused by network congestion and the unique processing bottlenecks associated with each network device.